What's behind the Big Bang controversy?

By Meg Urry

Updated 2:30 PM ET, Fri June 6, 2014

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Photos:Wonders of the universe

A dead star gives off a greenish glow in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and played up the theme in its press release. The agency said the "ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse." At the center of the Crab Nebula is the crushed core, or "heart" of an exploded star. The heart is spinning 30 times per second and producing a magnetic field that generates 1 trillion volts, NASA said.

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Peering through the thick dust clouds of the galactic bulge an international team of astronomers has revealed the unusual mix of stars in the stellar cluster known as Terzan 5. The new results indicate that Terzan 5 is one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of the very early days of the Milky Way.

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An artist's conception of Planet Nine, which would be the farthest planet within our solar system. The similar cluster orbits of extreme objects on the edge of our solar system suggest a massive planet is located there.

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An illustration of the orbits of the new and previously known extremely distant Solar System objects. The clustering of most of their orbits indicates that they are likely be influenced by something massive and very distant, the proposed Planet X.

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Say hello to dark galaxy Dragonfly 44. Like our Milky Way, it has a halo of spherical clusters of stars around its core.

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A classical nova occurs when a white dwarf star gains matter from its secondary star (a red dwarf) over a period of time, causing a thermonuclear reaction on the surface that eventually erupts in a single visible outburst. This creates a 10,000-fold increase in brightness, depicted here in an artist's rendering.

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Gravitational lensing and space warping are visible in this image of near and distant galaxies captured by Hubble.

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At the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers discovered an X-shaped structure within a tightly packed group of stars.

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Meet UGC 1382: What astronomers thought was a normal elliptical galaxy (left) was actually revealed to be a massive disc galaxy made up of different parts when viewed with ultraviolet and deep optical data (center and right). In a complete reversal of normal galaxy structure, the center is younger than its outer spiral disk.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula and its "beating heart," which is a neutron star at the right of the two bright stars in the center of this image. The neutron star pulses 30 times a second. The rainbow colors are visible due to the movement of materials in the nebula occurring during the time-lapse of the image.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a hidden galaxy that is fainter than Andromeda or the Milky Way. This low surface brightness galaxy, called UGC 477, is over 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Pisces.

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On April 19, NASA released new images of bright craters on Ceres. This photo shows the Haulani Crater, which has evidence of landslides from its rim. Scientists believe some craters on the dwarf planet are bright because they are relatively new.

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This illustration shows the millions of dust grains NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sampled near Saturn. A few dozen of them appear to have come from beyond our solar system.

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This image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile shows a stunning concentration of galaxies known as the Fornax Cluster, which can be found in the Southern Hemisphere. At the center of this cluster, in the middle of the three bright blobs on the left side of the image, lies a cD galaxy -- a galactic cannibal that has grown in size by consuming smaller galaxies.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using infrared technology, reveals the density of stars in the Milky Way. According to NASA, the photo -- stitched together from nine images -- contains more than a half-million stars. The star cluster is the densest in the galaxy.

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This image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136, which contains hundreds of massive stars, is visible in the lower right of the image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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In March 2016, astronomers published a paper on powerful red flashes coming from binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a black hole, similar to the one in V404 Cygni, devouring material from an orbiting star.

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A new map of the Milky Way was released February 24, 2016, giving astronomers a full census of the star-forming regions within our own galaxy. The APEX telescope in Chile captured this survey.

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This image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, deeply embedded within the Coma galaxy cluster. There is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

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An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126, which takens 900,000 years to orbit its star, 1 trillion kilometers away.

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Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune.

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An international team of astronomers may have discovered the biggest and brightest supernova ever. The explosion was 570 billion times brighter than the sun and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, according to a statement from The Ohio State University, which is leading the study. Scientists are straining to define the supernova's strength. This image shows an artist's impression of the supernova as it would appear from an exoplanet located about 10,000 light years away.

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Astronomers noticed huge waves of gas being "burped" by the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy 26 million light years from Earth. The team believes the outburst is a consequence of the interaction of NGC 5195 with a nearby galaxy.

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An artist's illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered the galaxy being powered by two black holes "furiously whirling about each other," the space agency said in a news release.

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An artist's impression of what a black hole might look like. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun.

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Are there are oceans on any of Jupiter's moons? The Juice probe shown in this artist's impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES

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Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away. This is an artist's concept of the phenomenon.

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Venus, bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of miles apart.

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Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of Earth's moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA's 2016 budget includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It's a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.

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This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Organization's Very Large Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's three great moons -- Io, Callisto, and Europa -- passing by at once.

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A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face? That's a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them.

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Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's. This is an artist's depiction of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.

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A patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).

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This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It's a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).

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NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of Creation," one of the space agency's most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

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Planetary nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement ring" effect.

NASA's NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.

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A supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22.

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The M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the 10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic studies with telescopes began in the 1930s.

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Is that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it's what's left of a star that died and exploded a long time ago. Astronomers nicknamed it the "Hand of God." NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. The center of the galaxy is mysterious, researchers say, because it has a double nucleus -- a supermassive black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the appearance of a dual core.

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Hubble scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

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Those spots on our sun appear small, but even a moderate-sized spot is about as big as Earth. They occur when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun's surface and let the area cool in comparison to the surrounding area.

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This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it's actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it's dying and is destined to go supernova.

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Story highlights

Meg Urry: A controversy about the origin of the universe came to light this week

She says controversy may be messy but that's how we make progress in science

Urry: Most scientists don't care about the "win" -- we care about getting nature right

Everyone wants to be right. Most of us sure hate being wrong.

But scientists know that new discoveries often change or even invalidate earlier ideas. Being wrong can mean we have learned something new.

This week, a controversy about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe came to light at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston. In an invited lecture sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel offered a different idea about a discovery made last March, where the BICEP2 Antarctic cosmology experiment reported evidence of a period of rapid "inflation" in the very early universe. Specifically, researchers detected the special pattern of polarization that would be caused by gravitational waves stretching and squeezing space itself during inflation.

Meg Urry

Last week, three theorists -- Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky -- were awarded the prestigious Kavli Prize for astrophysics for their work developing the theory of cosmic inflation. (This prize and the AAS lecture were sponsored by the same foundation but were otherwise completely independent.) Their award may well have been prompted by the BICEP2 discovery, which generated a lot of excitement about early universe cosmology.

But at the American Astronomical Society conference, Spergel argued that the BICEP2 results reported in March could instead be explained by a more pedestrian effect, namely, light scattering off dust between the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. If he is correct, the widely heralded BICEP2 announcement was premature at best and wrong at worst.

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This kind of controversy is completely normal in science. It's the way science progresses. You put an idea out there and your colleagues -- many of them good friends and scientific collaborators -- try to shoot it down.

A scientist's first reaction to a new idea is often: "That's wrong because...." To which the proponent replies, "No, you are wrong because..." And so the debate begins.

No matter how much a scientist might hope to be right, nature holds the answer. One theory may be more beautiful than another, or more complicated, or more elegant, but nature doesn't know or care. The job of a scientist is to find out what the real answer is, not to advocate for any one point of view.

We do that by making careful measurements and assessing the accuracy of the result. BICEP2 detected certain polarization patterns in light from the cosmic microwave background, which they believe were created during inflation. David Spergel is instead suggesting the light was polarized by passing through galactic dust near the end of its journey to our telescopes -- indeed, he argued, this dust is expected to create the kind of polarization signal BICEP2 saw.

To support his contention, Spergel cited data from a space experiment called Planck, which like BICEP2 measures polarized light from the cosmic microwave background. Planck's ability to measure light at more wavelengths than BICEP2 gives it an advantage in diagnosing the effects of dust.

If the BICEP2 team is correct, they detected the first signs of gravitational wave distortions of space in the first one hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of an early, extreme inflation of space -- an extremely important discovery.

If Spergel is correct, a significant signal from primordial gravitational waves has not yet detected and we need to keep looking for this critical probe of our universe.

New measurements from the Planck team are expected next fall. Maybe they will settle the controversy. Either way, an array of increasingly sensitive experiments will make still better measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

This is an important goal. Since the early universe is far hotter than any laboratory on Earth -- or, for that matter, in the most energetic regions around black holes or in the most massive clusters of galaxies -- it offers a very important experimental laboratory for testing fundamental physics theories.

That's one reason the debates will continue until one side convinces the other. But most scientists really don't care about the "win" -- we care about understanding nature.

Even Spergel, at the beginning of his address to the American Astronomical Society audience, called the BICEP2 results "heroic science" -- a very difficult measurement that pushes the limits of current technology.

Controversy and debate may be messy but that's how we make progress in science.